Changing Seasons

In traditional Chinese medicine the closest translation of Rheumatoid Arthritis is fengshi bing, literally "wind-damp disease".
It's actually been fairly warm, here, despite the season. It will get cold for two days and then be 80* for the next solid week. The rheumy cat and I would just like it to settle on something so we can put the correct number of blankets on the bed and turn the heat on or off for more than six hours at a time. We wouldn't mind, really, if it wanted to be cold. We own three heating pads and an electric blanket, and this pile of old love letters scrounged out of my parent's attic ain't gonna burn itself.

You Mean I'm Too Young To Be This Sexy, Right?

How is your week going? Today I found out that my rheumy cat, who has been terribly sick over the past week, has pancreatitis on top of everything. Then I spent a futile couple of hours trying to find white wool at a local fabric store for this big ol' scary wedding thing I am designing. After that I got myself scheduled for a bunch of really awful oral surgery the week after I come home from vacation. Provided, of course, that the cat recovers quickly enough that we can GO on vacation...
Anyway.
As I was going through the preliminary crapola with the surgeon she glanced at my questionnaire and exclaimed "arthritis? You are too young to have arthritis!"
Which I get ALL the time.
Rheumatoid arthritis isn't even AT ALL the same thing as osteoarthritis. It doesn't care how old you are or how many grands jetes you have executed. It shouldn't even be called arthritis, really, the name is sort of a relic of a simpler (AKA: crappier) age when medical imaging wasn't common and accessible (not that it's all that accessible NOW. Says the woman who just had to pay out of pocket for a CT scan of one stupid tooth) and symptoms had to work as complete descriptions for diseases. These days we know that it's more like your immune system freaking the hell out and attacking itself because it is stupid and you can't explain anything to an immune system. They just won't listen.
Anyway, consider this your public service message for the day: Rheumatoid Arthritis doesn't give a damn how old you are. 6 year olds get diagnosed with it, for reals. 

Leg Mounts

I hate leg mounts. Leg mounts are those things where you grab your foot and try to développé it up over your head. You know... in a perfect world, with a perfect body. When I have to do them (in the real world, with an aging arthritic body that has only been dancing for three years) it's more like I grab a hold of whatever piece of leg I can and then hike it up to about 45* off the floor. Which isn't even as high as I can développé! But it's as high as I can stand to put the weight of my leg on my hands (legs are heavy! There must be like 20 pounds in a leg. No wait, I will look it up...okay so there are TWENTY SIX pounds in an average female leg! Yikes!) All that weight on my wrists (the first and most horribly sensitive bit of arthritis in my body) is impossible! It's why I stopped doing yoga. I used to be able to do shoulder stands and all kinds of ridiculousness, but NO WAY is that happening these days. My hands are my life, my ability to work. Screwing them up even more with no payoff just makes me angry!
Last night as I unsuccessfully hauled my leg up with my aching hand my teacher asked me if there was something wrong with me. Yes! Leg mounts are wrong with me! She said she should bring me a bungee to use. Which is the silliest freakin' mental image I have ever had. Strapping my ankle up in a bungee and hauling it up like a fish in a net...

Yeah, like that. Except not at all, even slightly.

Health Stuff Blah

I'm feeling less dire about things today, but I decided to publish this post from a few days ago, anyway. For the sake of ... honesty? Completeness? Who else thinks the word "completeness" is stupid? It's one of those that should really have another tense. Like "completion" would sound better, but sadly it means something else. Sigh...

So, the horrible foot tendon thing that I was experiencing last week has (mostly) gone away. I babied it so much that I actually started getting foot cramps from lack of use! Silly. Silly and yet...

My shins splints are edging very slowly toward feeling better. I can jump! Sort of! (I mean, I am capable of jumping. Not that I am good at it.) It's been a very long and slow process to get to this point. And they still twinge at me when I try to do something like a ballotté, cabrioles, or hopping turns. Well... hmph. Hopping turns are dumb looking, anyway.

It's funny (not like "funny ha ha") the way I have become so utterly terrified of every new and unusual ache, pain, or click. I feel like at any moment I will "lose" another part of my body, but I never know which part, or when. Will it be my lower back, which has been aching for the past few days? Or will it be that pole of tightness down my achilles on cold mornings? My hips, that clonk and grab at me when lowering out of développé? Which part of me will fail completely enough to be in constant pain? And will it be a part I need in order to make it through my day? My work? My hobbies? I had to stop shooting my bow several years ago, will I have to stop dancing, next? Driving? Living in an upstairs apartment? When does it reach the breaking point, the point at which my doctors will believe me when I say I need help? When I finally test positive on their bloodwork will I be confined to a wheelchair?
Truth to tell, it's all kind of nerve-wracking.
I try not to think about it too much, or I'd never get anything accomplished.

 All my mad Google skillz couldn't locate the original source or credit for this image.

As always, if you are or know the creator please let me know so I can properly attribute it. 

Yoga For the Elderly, Decrepit, and Infirm

So, many moons ago (back in August, after my Summer job ended but before I started taking ballet) I was in the worst shape of my life and was seriously having trouble with the little things. Pain had become a constant in my life and I had just folded in on myself. Along with everything else, rheumatic conditions come along with a physical exhaustion that was not helped at all by the medications I had been prescribed, one of which is a sedative. And, my Summer job is HARD WORK, it's terribly brutal to my wrists and hands. I bring wrist braces to work and coat myself from the elbows down in Icy Hot two or three times a day. So, exercise? Not even happening. But, I decided that I was done looking sadly at the ballet studio's class schedules and that it was time to DO IT.
I knew I was out of shape and that it was going to be hard for me to get back in to the groove of regular exercise. So I decided I was going to do yoga every day in preparation for this whole ballet business. When I was in high school I came home every weekday afternoon and did yoga on the living room floor. My favorite things to do were shoulder stands (woo!) and sun salutation. I knew I couldn't put any weight on my hands and wrists anymore, so those were probably out. I looked around on Netflix and found "healing yoga for aches and pains" by these people. They aren't too annoying considering what else is out there (I have a preeeeeetty low opinion of most video exercise instructors).
I did it for a few days and I was feeling good! It was seriously difficult, though. I mean, really hard work. Now, this is what I affectionately call "old people yoga". Most of it is done sitting in a chair. Everything is modified for stability. But even so, MAN did I have a hard time with it. GEEZE. At one point in the video there is a modification of "eagle pose" (in which you cross your arms over each other at the elbow and link your hands to one another with your palms together) and it was so impossible that I quickly did a screen grab and this happened:

Anyway, so it was hard, but I was feeling progress. Unfortunately by the end of week one something was terribly wrong. My knees hurt. And so I stopped doing anything that could bother them. No weight bearing poses. Nothing. But then... they kept hurting.
They never stopped.
I started ballet class not long after that. The knees slowly became a part of my life. My doctor increased the dose on my pills. I learned to sleep with a heating pad and ice packs and spend as much time as possible in bed on any day when I knew I was going to be dancing. And yoga? I kind of forgot it.
So last week I decided to try out old "healing yoga for aches and pains" again. After all these months of ballet the entire thing is easier in a major way. It's not something you would notice if you were doing it consistently, but after a break for several months the difference is obvious. I still can't do anything that places my weight on my knees, though, so I have to skip the one posture they teach that involves that.
I was feeling pretty cocky about it after a few days and decided to try out another one of their videos, "yoga for common conditions". And boy howdey, that was a mistake. After the first three postures all involved either kneeling or folding the legs, I gave up. I can't even sit cross-legged on the floor anymore. So, my search for a new and gentle yoga program for ancient old codgers continues.
Updates as they become available!

My Humps My Humps My Lady Lumps, As They Say

I was just checking my page stats. Apparently "rheumatology hot booties" is a Google search term that leads to Rheumatic Princess. I am unsure what it implies about my readers, I just thought I would share!

On Cleaning One's Backside. An Essay.

So I have a couple of cats, and they are both very much Up In Our Bidness. But one of them (they are both about 8 or 9 years old) appears to be the most inflexible cat on the entire planet. Cats are supposed to be sleek and agile, right? But she is clumsy and kind of awkward. We occasionally complain at her because sometimes she just doesn't bother cleaning her posterior. And she sleeps on the bed, so SOMEONE has to clean it, right? Anywho. I have been watching her lately and I think the problem is just that she is not even vaguely flexible. To clean her rump she has to dig her claws in to a soft surface and then hike herself around to get in position. I wonder if maybe she had some traumatic injury as a kitten, or if she is just developing cat arthritis.
Because I know the feeling.
Not butt licking, of course ( I shouldn't have to add that "of course"). But, I have an awfully hard time getting up and around these days myself. Ballet is helping the flexibility, but my knees are shot all to heck. And I refuse to take showers because I think showers are gross. So I have to figure out how to get myself out of a bath tub on a regular basis. Right now I have a clawfoot tub with the original plumbing, which means exposed pipes that travel between the faucet and the shower head. So I can just grab on to the pipe right over the faucet, and sort of HAUL my ancient and creaky patoot out of the tub. I shudder to think about what will happen when we move. I am hoping, here is what I am hoping, I am hoping that the house will have been lived in by a very old woman. And so there will be one of those bars in the tub. For old folks.
They say you are only as old as you feel.
I think that makes me about NINETY.

edited to add: I forgot, this is the internet, so including a picture of said cat is practically required. The inflexible cat is madame on the left: